You probably remember exactly where you were when you first saw that heat map. It was late 2013, or maybe you caught the viral resurgence a few years later. Your Facebook feed was suddenly a sea of red, yellow, and blue maps of the United States. Everyone was obsessed. The New York Times dialect test—formally known as "How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk"—became a legitimate cultural phenomenon. It wasn't just another buzzfeed-style quiz about which Disney princess you are based on your sandwich preferences. It was math. It was linguistics. And for a lot of people, it was eerie.
It told you that you were from a specific suburb of Philadelphia because you call a long sandwich a "hoagie." Or it pegged you to a tiny radius in North Carolina because you say "sirrup" instead of "se-rup."
Josh Katz, who was then a graphics editor at the Times, built something that felt like a digital palm reading. But instead of reading lines on your hand, he read the way you pronounce "caught" and "cot." Honestly, the sheer scale of the response caught the paper off guard. It quickly became the most-viewed piece of content in the history of the New York Times. Not a breaking news story about an election. Not a war. A quiz about whether you call a sugary carbonated beverage "pop," "soda," or "coke."
The Data Behind the Map
This wasn't just a random set of questions pulled out of thin air. The New York Times dialect test was based on the Harvard Dialect Survey, a massive linguistic study conducted by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder back in 2002. They spent years cataloging how Americans speak.
Linguistics is messy. It’s about how sounds drift across state lines and how mountains or rivers once acted as barriers to how words evolved. Katz took that academic data and turned it into an interactive algorithm. The test asks 25 questions. Each answer narrows down the statistical probability of your geographic origin. It uses "isoglosses"—the fancy linguistic term for the boundary lines between different dialectal features.
Think about the word "y'all." If you use it, the algorithm immediately starts leaning toward the South. But that's too easy. The real magic happens when you get to the "Mary/Merry/Marry" merger. Do they all sound the same to you? If you’re from the Northeast, specifically around New York or Philadelphia, you probably think people who pronounce them the same are crazy. To a New Yorker, those are three distinct sounds. To someone from the Midwest, they are identical.
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Why We Are Obsessed With the Way We Talk
Language is identity. It’s a thumbprint. You might move away from your hometown, get a corporate job, and "clean up" your accent to sound more "General American," but the way you describe a "bubbler" (if you're from Wisconsin or Rhode Island) or a "water fountain" gives you away every time.
The New York Times dialect test tapped into a deep sense of nostalgia. In an era where the internet is supposedly making us all sound the same—the "YouTube accent" or "TikTok voice"—Katz’s map proved that regionality is stubborn. It persists.
I’ve seen people get genuinely angry at this quiz. They’ll say, "I've lived in Seattle my whole life, but it says I'm from Florida!" Usually, there’s a reason. Maybe their parents were from the Gulf Coast. Maybe they grew up in a household where "crawdad" was the only acceptable term for a crayfish. Our dialects are inherited treasures.
The Heavy Hitters: Soda, Sneakers, and Sunshowers
There are a few "key" questions in the New York Times dialect test that do the heavy lifting for the algorithm.
- The Carbonated Beverage Debate: This is the classic. "Soda" dominates the coasts and the Southwest. "Pop" is the king of the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. "Coke" is the generic term for everything in the Deep South. If you go to a restaurant in Atlanta and ask for a Coke, they might ask, "What kind?" and you'll say "Sprite."
- The Rubber-Soled Shoes: Are they "sneakers" or "tennis shoes"? Or, if you’re from a very specific part of South Jersey or Cincinnati, are they "gym shoes"?
- The Sunshower: What do you call it when the sun is shining but it’s raining at the same time? Most of the country has no word for it. But in parts of the South, they say "the devil is beating his wife." It’s a bizarre, specific idiom that acts as a linguistic GPS coordinate.
- The Drive-In Liquor Store: If you call it a "brew-thru," the map is going to zoom in on the Outer Banks of North Carolina faster than you can blink.
The Science of "Linguistic Drifting"
The test isn't perfect, and Katz has been open about that. The map represents a snapshot in time. Language is fluid. The "Low-Back Merger" (the caught-cot merger) is one of the biggest shifts happening in American English right now.
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Essentially, more and more Americans are losing the distinction between the "aw" sound in "caught" and the "ah" sound in "cot." If you're under 30, you probably pronounce them exactly the same. If you're over 60 and from the East Coast, you likely find that merger baffling. Because the test relies on historical data, younger users sometimes find their results "drifting" toward different regions than where they actually grew up. This isn't a bug; it's a feature of how English is evolving.
The Impact of Modern Mobility
We move more than we used to. In the 1950s, you likely lived within 20 miles of where you were born. Today, you might grow up in Ohio, go to college in Boston, and work in San Francisco.
This creates "dialect leveling." We subconsciously mimic the people around us to fit in. However, the New York Times dialect test focuses on the words you learned before you were ten years old. That’s when your "lexical set" is solidified. You can change your accent, but the word you use for a "drive-through liquor store" or a "sliding glass door" tends to stick.
How to Get the Most Accurate Result
If you're going back to take the test again—which, let's be honest, we all do every few years—you have to be honest. Don't answer how you think you should talk. Answer with the first word that pops into your head.
Don't overthink the "Pajamas" question. Is the "a" like "jam" or like "father"? Don't try to be fancy. If you grew up calling a remote control a "clicker," own it. That’s how the heat map finds its target.
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Why It Still Ranks and Trends
The reason we’re still talking about this specific piece of data journalism over a decade later is that it was the perfect marriage of "Big Data" and personal storytelling. It wasn't a dry report on linguistics. It was a mirror.
Every time it's shared on social media, it sparks a debate. "Who calls a dragonfly a 'skeeter hawk'?" "Wait, you guys call it a 'rotary' instead of a 'roundabout'?" These conversations are the lifeblood of the internet. They remind us that despite our digital homogenization, where we come from still matters.
Actionable Steps for Language Lovers
If you've already taken the test and want to go deeper into why you talk the way you do, there are a few things you can do next.
- Check the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE): This is the "gold standard" for linguistic research. It's a multi-volume project that maps out almost every weird regionalism ever uttered in the U.S.
- Analyze your "Second Dialect": If you've moved, pay attention to which words you've adopted. Do you say "y'all" now because you moved to Austin, even though you grew up in Chicago? This is called "code-switching," and it's a fascinating look into your own social adaptability.
- Record your elders: If you have grandparents from a specific region, record them talking. Regional dialects are thinning out. The way a 90-year-old from the Appalachian Mountains speaks is vastly different from how a 20-year-old from the same town speaks.
- Explore the "Atlas of North American English": Created by William Labov, this is the heavy-duty academic version of the NYT quiz. It’s less "fun" but incredibly detailed regarding vowel shifts and phonetics.
The New York Times dialect test remains a masterclass in how to make complex science accessible. It turned us all into amateur sociolinguists for a day. It proved that whether you’re eating a "sub," a "grinder," a "hero," or a "po-boy," you’re participating in a rich, centuries-old history of human migration and cultural evolution.
Take the test again. See if your "heat map" has shifted. You might find that your language is more of a traveler than you are.